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MacBook Air 2013 Gaming Performance (Intel HD 5000)
- Thread starter Yixian
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thats a possibility as well. I though I could get some actual info from people who are playing WOW, you know hands on info. But thanks for the suggestion, i'm at Grand Central everyday, it wouldn't hurt stopping by and asking, plus the retail girls are beautiful
Can anyone test GTA 4 and see how it runs on any configured air. Just want to get a idea of the fps.
To give an example of long term playing, I have been playing Minecraft in Mountain Lion (fast setting, not fancy, all else max, 40-60 fps) like crazy on my 13"/i7/8gb/128gb. I'm sure it loads it just as much if not more than WoW, for 7-8 hours a day 3 days in a row now, never rebooted, never slowed down.
I work in a call center job that lets me bring my laptop and play games, I just leave the game running at my desk, and jump on it whenever I get a chance. Within a few minutes, the laptop gets very hot in the top left corner above the keyboard, but never gets hotter even after 8 hours straight.
(Side note, Minecraft will play for almost 4 hours straight starting from 100% battery)
I work in a call center job that lets me bring my laptop and play games, I just leave the game running at my desk, and jump on it whenever I get a chance. Within a few minutes, the laptop gets very hot in the top left corner above the keyboard, but never gets hotter even after 8 hours straight.
(Side note, Minecraft will play for almost 4 hours straight starting from 100% battery)
Civ
I have read all the Civ V post in this thread and I thank you all for your input. Has any had time to do any late game stuff on OSX with the i5?
I have read all the Civ V post in this thread and I thank you all for your input. Has any had time to do any late game stuff on OSX with the i5?
I'm playing a late game WWII scenario (Full Earth WWII) as Germany - lots of units, surrounded by lots of Russian and French units on my rMBP 15" (650GT). It's essentially the same game you'd find at turn 200 (lots of fully developed civs).
I loaded it up on my sister's 2013 MBA (base model Haswell) via Steam and it was generally unplayable at lowest resolution and lowest settings. Time between turns was a minimum of 3-4 minutes and it would crash occasionaly. Scrolling around map was a total slideshow.
By comparion, I started a new game on the MBA and played 10 turns and, as you can imagine, it was pretty good. Scrolled smoothly with a little stutter here and there.
I can't see the MBA being useful for late-game CIV marathons. Even my rMBP takes a long time to process turns and I've dialed a lot of settings down.
There is, however, a pretty signifigant boost in performance when I play it via bootcamp. Maybe a bootcamp+MBA solution would be playable.
Most of my stretches were around the two to three hour mark. At times, four plus.
Just wanted to add my thoughts on how Football Manager 2013 is running on my MBA 11" i7/8GB as I myself tried googling how playable it was on the MBA 11".
Football Manager 2013 is a massively CPU intensive game, and on the MBA 2013 it's quite fast. You obviously won't get the full 9 hours, but it'll give you around 3-4 hours if you play it non stop. The machine also gets hot at times - not unplayable hot, but the fans speed up. Heat is a problem on any laptop running this game as far as I know. When it comes to watching the matches the animations are usually smooth, although when you're running low on battery the game gets slower - my guess is that some power saving mechanism is disabling the turbo boost of the CPU.
The biggest issue with gaming on the MBA 11" though is the screen resolution as the window gets pretty cramped. It's fully playable, although the 13" might be the better option both due to the significantly larger screen and the better battery capacity. For me the MBA 11" is perfect even though the screen is a tad cramped and the battery only gets you as far as it does.
One thing that might bother you (it did surely bother me) is that Football Manager 2013 in full screen mode doesn't support the native OS X full screen mode. This means that in order to do other stuff (e.g. swapping spaces) whilst the game is running the game is forced into windowed mode. The problem with the original windowed mode is that the minimum height of the window is 800 px, whilst the MBA has a height of 768 px.
To fix this you'll have to force a "--small_window option" when launching the game (Set launch option, add --small_window). You'll also have to press "maximize" window (green button) in order to resize the window to fit the screen so the bottom of the windows isn't off screen. You can also change some OS X settings in order to hide the top bar whilst playing (instructions on how to run it smooth here: http://community.sigames.com/showth...ile-windowed?p=8880711&viewfull=1#post8880711).
Summarized - the MBA plays almost perfect with the 11" and 100 % perfect on the 13". Game on!
Football Manager 2013 is a massively CPU intensive game, and on the MBA 2013 it's quite fast. You obviously won't get the full 9 hours, but it'll give you around 3-4 hours if you play it non stop. The machine also gets hot at times - not unplayable hot, but the fans speed up. Heat is a problem on any laptop running this game as far as I know. When it comes to watching the matches the animations are usually smooth, although when you're running low on battery the game gets slower - my guess is that some power saving mechanism is disabling the turbo boost of the CPU.
The biggest issue with gaming on the MBA 11" though is the screen resolution as the window gets pretty cramped. It's fully playable, although the 13" might be the better option both due to the significantly larger screen and the better battery capacity. For me the MBA 11" is perfect even though the screen is a tad cramped and the battery only gets you as far as it does.
One thing that might bother you (it did surely bother me) is that Football Manager 2013 in full screen mode doesn't support the native OS X full screen mode. This means that in order to do other stuff (e.g. swapping spaces) whilst the game is running the game is forced into windowed mode. The problem with the original windowed mode is that the minimum height of the window is 800 px, whilst the MBA has a height of 768 px.
To fix this you'll have to force a "--small_window option" when launching the game (Set launch option, add --small_window). You'll also have to press "maximize" window (green button) in order to resize the window to fit the screen so the bottom of the windows isn't off screen. You can also change some OS X settings in order to hide the top bar whilst playing (instructions on how to run it smooth here: http://community.sigames.com/showth...ile-windowed?p=8880711&viewfull=1#post8880711).
Summarized - the MBA plays almost perfect with the 11" and 100 % perfect on the 13". Game on!
Air is a DISASTER for games and is NOT designed for gaming. Period !
Mine was making more noise than a boeing 787 ofcourse with the fans and heat
Mine was making more noise than a boeing 787 ofcourse with the fans and heat
Ok, so I just took a whole bunch of videos of gaming on my Macbook Air, I'm processing the videos on the air itself right now so its going to take a bit of time, but I'll be uploading all of them on youtube. I'm fairly impressed with the performance for such an ultraportable laptop! And this is coming from me who typically runs a gaming PC with Dual Radeon 7950s and a 3.8ghz Core i7 processor!
Games featured are:
Minecraft http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmgprK9W044
Starcraft 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFE15JvTCBA
Diablo III http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KL6PG5I06sw
World of Warcraft http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdYlZo62uns
Kerbal Space Program http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdqHcKL_LFc
Team Fortress 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_6MBYR90Bs
Borderlands 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvDIV3LMQMM
That's it for now, but I can do more later possibly. I'll be installing Windows later this week as well and plan on doing some more gaming videos on the Macbook Air. For reference I have the 2013 MBA with the i5/8gb/256gb.
Games featured are:
Minecraft http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmgprK9W044
Starcraft 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFE15JvTCBA
Diablo III http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KL6PG5I06sw
World of Warcraft http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdYlZo62uns
Kerbal Space Program http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdqHcKL_LFc
Team Fortress 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_6MBYR90Bs
Borderlands 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvDIV3LMQMM
That's it for now, but I can do more later possibly. I'll be installing Windows later this week as well and plan on doing some more gaming videos on the Macbook Air. For reference I have the 2013 MBA with the i5/8gb/256gb.
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Woah thanks for all the videos, will definitely help out a lot (I have the same specs.)
Before buying the MBA my intention has always been to play some light games (Mainly TF2, L4D2, LoL, Minecraft, etc.) nothing like Battlefield 3 or Skyrim.
If its not a hassle could you think about doing a League of Legends video?
Some people say it runs fine but on the LoL, the Mac version seems to have a load of problems. I could download it myself to find out but I've only been using my first Mac since yesterday. I'm still not sure how to do much yet.
Thanks
I can tell you now that GTA IV is not going to run well on the Air. It's odd, but I just installed it on my gaming PC earlier today and even it is somewhat struggling with it and it's got a i5 OC'ed to 4.4Ghz, 8GB RAM, and a GTX 570 overclocked. It just passes at playing it almost maxed out at 1920x1080, so that should tell you something.
Unfortunately, GTA IV was just really poorly optimized for PC, so performance suffers due to that.
Lol why do you wanna fry your machine and cook an omelet on it
It doesn't get that hot to be honest.
So I just bought a 13" i7/8GB/256GB Air. The only game that I will ever play is Starcraft 2. I bought a Windows version a few years ago. Ive never owned a mac, will I have any troubles running SC2? Should I run it on OS X? or Windows? If yes, How do I run it with Windows? If no, do I have to pay for another SC or can I somehow use my Windows version on Mac? Any help is appreciated. Thx
Howdy,
Got 13" i7/8GB/256 model, installed bootcamp Win 7 and tried some games.
Skyrim runs on native resolution, low preset settings(no aa) when walking and running around 25-32 fps. During fights with few bandits, about 19-28 fps.
In caves etc. it goes up to 45 fps.
On 720p, medium preset settings it runs around 30-45 fps when running around.
In fights it goes down to 22-35. It really depends on the situation.
In caves it spikes up even to 60-ish fps.
In my opinion very playable. Just plug in the headphones, because the fans kick in about 10-15 minutes of play.
If you'd like, I can upload some gameplay footage later.
Next stop --> Torchlight 2
Got 13" i7/8GB/256 model, installed bootcamp Win 7 and tried some games.
Skyrim runs on native resolution, low preset settings(no aa) when walking and running around 25-32 fps. During fights with few bandits, about 19-28 fps.
In caves etc. it goes up to 45 fps.
On 720p, medium preset settings it runs around 30-45 fps when running around.
In fights it goes down to 22-35. It really depends on the situation.
In caves it spikes up even to 60-ish fps.
In my opinion very playable. Just plug in the headphones, because the fans kick in about 10-15 minutes of play.
If you'd like, I can upload some gameplay footage later.
Next stop --> Torchlight 2